Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/480

 454 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1861,

young Horace Mann, eldest son of the school-re former and statesman of that name, a silent, earnest, devoted naturalist, who died early. The place where his party met the Indians only a few months before the Minnesota massacre of 1862 was in the county of Eedwood, in the southwest of the State, where now is a thriving village of 1,500 people, and no buffaloes within five hundred miles. Redwing, whence the letter was written, is below St. Paul, on the Mississippi, and was even then a considerable town, now a city of 7,000 people. The civil war had lately begun, and the whole North was in the first flush of its uprising in defense of the Union, for which Thoreau, in spite of his earlier defiance of government (for its alliance with slavery) was as zealous as any soldier. He returned in July, little benefited by the journey, of which he did not take his usual sufficiency of notes, and to which there is little allusion in his books. Nor does it seem that he visited on the way his corre spondent since January, 1856, C. H. Green, of Rochester, Michigan, who had never seen him in Concord. The opinion of Thoreau him self concerning this journey will be found in his next letter to Daniel Ricketson.